Mediaboss Marketing

Connecting with consumers on social media is translating into sales. Image source: The Motley Fool

According to enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis specialist Searchmetrics, the social media platform can play an outsized role in helping consumers make product-purchasing decisions. Engagement, as it's called, can help boost a brand's perception, which theoretically ought to lead to higher sales.

Forrester Research found that a third of consumers who engage with companies on social networks use the platforms for brand discovery, only slightly less than the 41% who said they did so through ads placed on social networks. In fact, social networks were almost as important as search engines in exploring and researching brands or products. Users relied upon social networks 37% of the time compared to 40% for search engines.

And just as significant, of all the social networks out there, it was Facebook that was the primary resource used, just behind Google , and ahead of TV shows and advertising.

In an effort to boost sales, mass merchandisers are catching on to this trend. And since brand loyalty is huge in retail, let's dig into which big box retailer enjoys the most social media engagement with its customers.

Searching for an answer Searchmetrics analyzed Facebook activity surrounding three mass merchants and nine U.S. department stores during the just-passed holiday season looking to see which one enjoyed the most likes, comments, and shares.

Recently, warehouse club Costco Wholesale earned high praise as the best retailer to work for in 2015, in large part because of how it treats its employees, not to mention that its customers like it too. Costco reported an 8% increase in December comparable-store sales, and analysts think it can continue growing earnings at a better than 10% clip over the next five years.

Yet despite such accolades and performance, Costco wasn't the retailer that came out on top with consumers who engaged mass merchants on Facebook over the holiday season. When it comes to connecting through page likes, comments made, and shares of stories with friends, Costco actually came in third with some 5.3 million links or number of engagements experienced per week.

That's a large number by itself, but was actually just a third of the engagements enjoyed by second place Target , which recorded 16.5 million links per week.

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You'll Never Guess Which Mass Merchant Was Social Media's Favorite Last Christmas (Hint: It Wasn't C